


Every Small and Every Significant Thing

by raedbard



Series: Maps of Other Places [2]
Category: The West Wing
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Historical, Angst, M/M, Queer Themes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-02-18
Updated: 2009-02-18
Packaged: 2017-10-05 02:06:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/36611
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raedbard/pseuds/raedbard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They kiss, and Sam remembers something he hasn't thought about in years, even this year, because pilgrimages must look forward and not backwards, even within this peripatetic love story of theirs, and he had forgotten. He lies on the bed with his lover, and forces his fingers to make half-remembered journeys across Toby's mouth. The routes have not changed though the scenery has, a little.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Every Small and Every Significant Thing

**Author's Note:**

> Written for BlackEyedGirl on her birthday.

**prologue: it is 1971, and nothing is the same**

The agent called, and then the publisher, and then Sam's mother which was embarrassing for both of them. He heard Sam mutter something about _an old friend_ and a silence not crackling on the other end of the line that lasted just a little too long. And Toby took a walk down to the river that day, a long walk; a walk to say goodbye. And the river screamed and roiled and Toby heard songs there that he had thought so long out of print they had almost never existed; just dusty pages, curling at the edges; broken records with scratches and torn labels and missing sleeves. He stood at the side of the river with his fingers gripping the railing, freezing there, but he did not feel any pain.

He wished those months -- the space Sam had made inside the apartment, inside the city that he had thought his only, the small and tentative, pencil-drawn sketches of something he had long given up for lost that had appeared inside the closing of his night-time heart -- wished them gone.

He held on to the railing, in overcoat and scarf. Too old now, for all of this; for all this grief. He covered his face with his hands, for a moment, then began the walk back home.

But then he says, "Are you sending me away?"

And Toby finds that he cannot do it twice. And Sam smiles, and Toby tries not to return it but smiles are too easy to give away, and he seems to give more easily now than formerly, and does not understand why that is.

"You can have an opinion, you know."

"I don't know."

"Lost for words?"

"Perhaps."

"May I stay, here?"

Age hasn't touched him, and this is the first time that Toby has really looked to see. His eyes still out-blue the sky, and the sea. They crease and brighten with the smile.

"Toby?"

"I haven't anything left to teach you."

"Who said I wanted to learn?"

He grins. He is wearing a white tee shirt under a black sweater and Toby takes a deep breath, an inhalation that seems to draw the whole room closer to him, then stretches out his hand. His fingers connect to the tender place at Sam's throat, where his breath once gathered, where his kisses have clustered, where memory has insisted love could be reawakened, if only he would remember. Sam breathes out, very slowly. Toby brushes his fingers up Sam's neck. The kiss comes, quietly: a walk through a city visited long ago, but learnt the first time over -- soft, sweet mouth, the turn of Sam's nose against his own and the sharp jut of his chin, that Sam's hands stray into Toby's beard first and then his hair, that the kid is getting hard in his tight jeans.

Toby walks him backwards, their thighs brushing, feet crushed, knees bumping, into the brittle winter sunlight, underneath the window, and stares at him; and it doesn't make the difference it used to. Sam smiles, with his fingers running the length of Toby's collar.

"So I can stay?"

Toby bends his head to kiss underneath Sam's jaw, the sharp point there, the edge of the map.

"You _may_."

*

**i. couplets on everything he isn't**

It is Christmas before the book is published; the second book. Toby calls it this in his head, though he would never say so to Sam. He starts writing in its margins, in pencil, without even thinking about what he is doing. First, notes; corrections that are six months too late. Then fragments that occur to him slowly, like thoughts that come in the minutes between lying down in bed at night with eyes closed and toes cold and the moment that consciousness is lost; crowding in on him like passers-by on the sidewalk, that he must push and jostle, and not make eye contact with. For a while he doesn't even realise that he is reading with a sharpened pencil in his fingers and tapping it against the spine of the book in time with a song even he cannot quite hear, not yet, and though he does not think of or care to recognise themes and motifs, he realises after a few days that he is walking around Brooklyn thinking about legacies and outcasts and men who make pilgrimages only to find that the homes they have left behind bear an uncanny resemblance to those they are trying to make in new green places. And he smiles to himself, and doesn't tell Sam what he thinks. Then one night he sits down and re-reads the book all the way through -- one long draught of Sam's prose that gets him drunk and stupid, and melancholy without knowing why. That night he lies in bed beside Sam watching the ceiling intently and waiting for the patch of damp just to the left of centre to stop spinning round in its tiny night-time circle. When he dreams it is of a massive ship and a grey ocean stretching out like a lazy continent, and at journey's end a beautiful boy on the shore, who looks too much like his brother.

He wakes from that dream sweating and nervous and sits up on the side of the bed with his head bent close to his hands, concentrating on breathing steadily. Sam stirs and, still half-asleep, puts his palm flat to Toby's back, strokes there in a desultory way before turning over and putting his head back down. Toby turns and stares at him -- pale against the dark pillows and desperately beautiful with closed eyes and mussed hair, and is amazed that he has never realised just how like David Sam is.

Toby gets back in the bed and pulls the covers over himself and moves in close to Sam's body: breast to back, soft cock to coccyx and one ankle hooked across his shin. He strokes Sam's hair, idly pulls out the tangles. Sam mutters something, or moans; Toby kisses the curving of his neck, then sleeps.

Eventually he asks, of course. _What d'you think?_ It's been coming a long time, this small question that sidles out of Sam's mouth one evening, when Toby least expects it.

There is no answer that will satisfy either of them, so what Toby actually says is a little about grammar and style, and imagery, and how a long book isn't necessarily a better one and how Sam should maybe think about a couple of these things for the next time. And Sam listens, with the same expression on his face that he used to have as a graduate student, when Toby would criticise his papers in their bed, with his index finger rolling small concentric circles over Sam's forearm or the inside of his thigh; that were the world to fall apart and everything else Sam understands to fall into dust, he would still know better than to expect unqualified praise from Toby. And Toby thinks that his face is amused, as well as loving, and a little sad too -- just a slight fading of joy, because nothing can ever be perfect and he had forgotten that for a moment of two, riding on fantasy, watching Toby read his words.

So Toby says, "It's beautiful," quietly, down into his coffee cup as Sam walks out of the room.

Sam stops in the doorway; Toby looks up, watches him over the rims of his reading glasses. Sam turns, slightly, one shoulder back inside the room. He doesn't look up.

"You really think so?"

Toby wonders for a second just how well he has done his job of making Sam a man. Is this love or his old student talking? And then he wonders if they were ever different things.

"I do really think so."

Sam nods, just once. Then he says, "Thank you," and walks out of the room.

*

**ii. he wants to sing into his hands**

That Toby doesn't really remember how they fell in love bothers him less than it might another man. Their love story is the secret narrative of two books now, and Toby suspects that they will not be the last but he still wishes he could remember a moment when he looked up at the face of a young man he was not supposed to pay more than cursory attention to and realised that those stories were waiting to be written, one day.

He has some vague idea that Sam won him over with those first intelligent, uncriticised papers. The papers Toby would grudgingly scrawl 'A's on in red ink and hand back without meeting Sam's eyes. He remembers liking the kid, again grudgingly, because he he sat in the same seat he almost destroyed on the first day for every lecture and held his head high when the rest of the class laughed at him, probably because he didn't even notice he was being laughed at. Toby remembers that he couldn't help admiring that, or fail to be aware that the kid could make him smile behind his hand without even knowing it.

He remembers, distantly, a day when Sam stayed behind and stood by his front row desk like a tall white flower, clutching his books to his chest. He had a question about something, about one of the texts Toby thinks, maybe John Locke. He stood there until all his classmates had left the lecture hall, the boys with the boys and the girls with the girls, and the room was desolate without their chatter, Toby remembers, but easier to breathe in too.

Sam had walked up to the desk while Toby was still head-down putting away his own books and papers, and said _Professor_ as though it hurt him. It was in those unremarkable days before he had Toby's name in his mouth, and Toby seems to remember that he was blushing, but bravely, as though he was squeezing all his courage up into his voice, for five minutes alone with the one he thought, even then, that he loved.

Toby's memory gets hazier when he tries to think of what he did: answers he might have given are long gone, like those old A-graded papers they might have discussed that afternoon. Toby doesn't know how Sam made him feel before he handed over his name like a gift, in a deserted library stack. For Toby that is still the first clear day.

He had followed because there was something in Sam's face that made it impossible not to; something that billowed, red and huge, secrets that were done being secret: the day Sam decided to be brave.

He had followed because his dream the previous night was one that he actually remembered, and remembers still. Sam -- young, stupid Sam with his lips that looked perpetually just-kissed and that light in his eyes that wasn't nearly as naive as it had seemed at first -- walking with him on the streets of a city that wasn't New York, by a river that wasn't the Hudson and wasn't the East, and wasn't the Rhine. Toby didn't think then, and doesn't now, that it was any city that exists outside his imagination; somewhere that it was acceptable to hold hands with a boy in the street, and be a Jew, and write words for a living.

That Sam had been a defining feature of his unconscious utopia wasn't the only reason, but he had not known that then. He followed because he was beckoned, because he was intrigued, because Sam was wearing a pair of pants that clung to his ass, because he had woken up that morning and not wanted a slug of whiskey.

But that Sam was never an uncomplicated presence in his heart, Toby has known for a long time. Now that the myriad points of reference have all contracted to one and it takes a dream or a particularly strong scent of salt and sea journeys coming off the Hudson in the early morning to make him remember the ones who have gone, it is harder to understand the time when Sam was only one of the points; the most recent, the most fancifully beautiful, who loved -- it seemed -- without condition. From that time came the bones of the story, however, and the melody of the song. And when Sam stands in their kitchen over-frying mushrooms and garlic and talking fast about what he finds beautiful in poetry or music and how he has tried to bend those principles of beauty into new shapes with his own prose like a blacksmith with iron, Toby thinks about his brother and his encyclopaedias and his pond-life in jars on the kitchen table of the tiny Brooklyn apartment where they forgot their Yiddish. And when Sam wears a red tie and tries to come on smooth, taking Toby's hand in his own when they walk down the street in the dark after a show has ended or a restaurant has kicked them out and he plays at being coy in the foyer of their building, asking for a kiss when the night watchman has turned away, Toby thinks about his wife with her red coat and her habit of laughing in the middle of the sermon at their shul, because the rabbi's beard had twisted itself into some new implausible shape, and tease him afterwards when he played at reprimands.

There are no ghosts anymore, except the ones they share, and the ones that grew in thirteen years of separation. Sam's fiancée never called him back, only sent the largest FedEx parcel Toby has ever seen out to the apartment, without a note. Sam cried, a little, that night, but he did it over Toby's whiskey and into Toby's shirt. By way of a promise Toby only has the fact that he has held the lease on this apartment for almost ten years now, as the only signatory, and the empty double bed.

So who cares that he doesn't remember how the story started? He thinks he knows well enough how it will end.

*

**iii. a particularly involved monologue on the responsibilities of liberty**

"So, they don't care that you live with another man?"

"They don't seem to."

"But it's not like -- "

"Sam, so long as I'm not buggering any of the students in the ... in the libraries, I think I'm probably okay. It is 1971 after all."

"Plus all your students are women," Sam says, grinning.

"Not _all_ of them are women. And there are laws about that too."

Sam snorts. "But what's the ratio of women to men?"

"... About six to one."

Sam laughs and presses his shoulder against Toby's for a long moment. He is thirty-six years old, the same age as Toby was when they met, and Toby thinks he is as beautiful as any of the nineteen year old boys in his classes, and more. The kids at his school have lately tended towards unruly hair and untrimmed beards and tee-shirts with slogans on them that Toby doesn't need to have attended Pop Culture 101 to think are uninspiring garbage. But the faces of the boys -- and girls -- walking around with the slogans on their chests are like Sam's was, or how it should have been: fierce and brave and proud.

"So I don't have to worry about you?" Sam says, still smiling, down at his hands, as though he doesn't expect an answer; as though he would rather not think about all the answers he _might_ receive.

"Sam?"

"Yeah," he says, looking up, grinning nervously. "I know. I'm sorry."

"Sam. Are you ... Is everything -- "

"I'm fine, Toby. I'm just ... I don't know."

"It's not going to happen again, Sam."

"Because the Dean of Sarah Lawrence couldn't care less that he's employed a fag Politics professor?" Anger makes his blush flare -- across his cheekbones and high spots of colour underneath his jaw. "Because it's 1971 one now, and that kind of thing doesn't happen anymore?" Sadness -- a hurt too old to be easily forgotten or brushed away by Toby's reassurances, by Toby's hands -- blues his eyes up to dazzling, and Toby has to blink before he can answer, or even think of a word he can say.

"It's not the same."

"Because a college never worried about what their employees do on their own time," he says. "Sure, Toby."

"I think I still have my right to privacy, Sam. I don't think the Dean has a kid on an extra credit assignment posted on the street corner right now looking for silhouettes. With us it was ... different."

"It was morally reprehensible."

"Sam -- "

"It was, Toby. It was wrong."

Toby closes his eyes for a moment, exhales.

"So are you ... what? Are you blaming me?"

Sam smiles, off into the distance. He has linked his hands in his lap and Toby stares at them, at the pale pink of his fingertips and the slightness of his wrists, how comparatively hairless they still are.

"No, I'm not blaming you." He gets up from the couch, leaving a patch of warmth where their thighs had been touching, cooling in the air. Toby watches as he walks to the window. "Like I was some stupid kid who didn't know that all you wanted was to get in my pants." Sam turns round and smiles sadly at Toby. "As it were."

"Sam, what the hell -- "

"I was just thinking," he says, "About that day. And how if I was a woman everyone'd say it was _my_ fault, because I led you on."

"Except that you _didn't_."

"Didn't I?," he says. "There was something ... I felt like I _knew_ you, even though I could have counted the times we'd said more than ten words to each other on the fingers of one hand. But I felt like I knew you anyway. And that that gave me some kind of right to touch you," he looks up again, smiles his little-boy smile, "To fall in love with you."

Toby lets their eyes touch for a moment, then looks away, as if the gaze has suddenly grown red hot.

"But I didn't know that was wrong, because I was nineteen years old."

"I wasn't."

"I'm sorry?"

"I _wasn't_ nineteen."

"Yeah. I know that."

"You'd have rather ... what? That I'd told you 'thanks but no thanks'? That I'd given you a pat on the head and sent you on your way, Sam?"

"No," he says quietly.

"So, what is your argument?"

"That we shouldn't have done it. This. And that it's not that simple, and it never has been."

"You like the simple answers, Mister Seaborn," Toby says, wondering if Sam will correct him. "You always did."

"It was simpler then," Sam says.

Toby nods. "Yes, it was. It was black and white, and we were gray."

"I hated being ... gay, Toby. Being _different_. I didn't really realise that I ... but I didn't ... understand."

"You listened to your father," Toby says quietly.

"Yeah, I guess I did." He smiles, a little sadly, and walks back across the room to sit down beside Toby again. He stares at Toby's hands which are resting on his knees, then reaches out and takes the right and folds it in his own. Toby swallows; oddly elated, and slightly uncomfortable with that elation -- as though it doesn't belong to him. Sam squeezes his hand. He says, "It's easy to be an advocate or a protester ... if you haven't got anything to lose. And I could have done that -- nice WASP boy and my father's money. But you came along instead. Fucked me up."

Toby smiles at that; a crooked twist of his mouth directed down towards his shoes. "I'm ... sorry," he mutters.

"Yeah."

"Sam, you want to know what I think?"

"What?"

"You'd have been that guy -- the guy who cares about the big issues, and the small potatoes; who stands up and says 'this is wrong' because that's what he thinks, because it _offends_ his humanity to have another person made less than him, because of sex or race or whoever that person wants to go to bed with, or whatever other stupid thing someone decided he didn't want admitted into the pantheon of human virtues when he woke up that morning. You were that guy when I met you. You haven't given me any reason to suspect that that guy has moved out. You're the kind of man bright new dawns get named for, Sam."

"Toby -- "

"Shut up. Let me finish." He turns Sam's hand over in his own, rubs his thumb over Sam's skin for a little, trying to make the words come out _straight_. "I think that if you'd be heterosexual, if you'd taken your father's money and gone to law school like he wanted and maybe headed out to D.C. and gone to work on the Hill, you could have grown up to make John Kennedy look like your support act." Toby sighs. "Like the fish course at a five star restaurant."

"Toby ... "

"I'm not done yet," he says, softly.

"Sorry."

"But you're not heterosexual. And I did come along ... and fucked you up. So maybe we'll have to wait a little while for that particular ... barn to burn. But ... if you wanted to, somehow ... I don't have any doubts."

"Toby."

He shrugs, inhales, then exhales a long breath. Sam is staring at him like he just told him the secret of eternal life, and Toby has to smile.

"So I'm sorry, really." He frowns. "I guess that's what I'm trying to say."

Sam smiles too, still sad but no longer angry; the tendrils of a life he has never admitted he wanted before now slipping away from him, like smoke in a crowded room, realities resolving into a single point in front of their eyes. He takes his hand out of Toby's, turns a little in his seat. He puts his hand up to Toby's face, strokes his cheek and the sharp line of his cheekbone, then cups Toby's straight, high jaw in his palm. He leans forward and kisses Toby gently, his lips only parting at the last moment, just as he pulls away.

"I never knew you thought that."

"I don't think I did either."

Sam laughs, silently. Toby shifts closer to him on the couch, letting out a long sigh as he does so. He curls his arm around Sam's shoulders and pulls him close against his body, holds him tightly, as though he might blow away in the Brooklyn breeze. Sam sighs too, then puts his head down on Toby's chest, just at the point where chest broadens and hardens into collarbone and shoulder. Toby thinks he's closed his eyes.

*

**iv. a man made of clay**

He had not thought about it in years, hadn't had any reason to. Hadn't had any wish to. The memories had become too painful:

David stumbling into his brother's lusts, head-first down the stairs, not understanding because that was another way he was lucky but making a promise because that was who he was -- Toby's light half, the one who said the soothing words and the calming gestures; who wrapped himself around Toby's anger and took all the kickings, and still kept that secret.

His brother died two years ago, and Toby had believed that the need for the secret-keeping had died with him; plucked out like a snuffed candle, taking some of the light. After Sam, after running from place to place with the dust of the last city clinging to his heels, after finally settling in the place he knew he was running to all along, there was no-one else, so no new secrets to guard.

Toby smiles a tight smile to himself. If only.

He worked industriously and gratefully at Sarah Lawrence, after coming to them lowly and hating it. Like Butler all over again he had to read the letter twice before he believed it wasn't a joke, some way to grind him further down to dust. David had told him to stop being so damn proud, so damned stupid. _Just take the job_. Toby, whose head wouldn't stay on one reaction for longer than ten minutes at a time, told him to go to hell, then called him back in the morning, on the near edge of tears, on the near edge of a story that he did not want to tell then. David only asked him if he thought he could be happy there.

He turned up to the College in the morning earlier than everyone else and left later than most, because it was necessary then to fill the empty spaces up with books and kids and the satisfaction of ideas; the strange frisson of idealism that fizzed in his lecture halls and in his seminars, crackling between the students freely, until Toby wondered if it would truly set them all on fire.

He watched a world changing; he preached its changing to those children -- big words that wound around them, like cloaks and armour, that made it onto banners and into slogans, that kept them coming back to him with that light in their eyes like he was something special; that in the middle of his darkness, and this messy forging of a life, there is something clear and bright. The kids, boys and girls, young well-spoken people whose minds always make Toby think of fireworks, Catherine wheels sparkling in endless arcs, come and ask him questions after class. Sometimes they track him down at the bar on campus, when his mind is on other things. They buy him weak beer and pound his brain with theories, but they stare at him too -- open and receptive, falling in love with his incongruities and his ability to say powerful things softly and calmly, so that they almost don't realise that he is old enough to be their father. They stare at him, and in their eyes Toby glimpses, sometimes, something he wishes he could hold on to.

One night he got drunk; heavy whiskey following beer and conversation, and the bright blue eyes of a Politics Major who had grabbed hold of his arm at the bar and begun throwing ideas at him like so many Roman candles, calling him 'Professor' over and over. Toby had an idea that the boy was after more than intellectual give and take but by the time the whiskey bottle was half-empty he was no longer in a position to trust his memories; they sounded too much like his daydreams. He lay in bed that night with his hand curled around his erection and his eyes tightly shut, half-praying and half-cursing, too old for taking what is offered and giving up self-hatred; too old to be gay and _free_. Only old and queer, lying in darkness, falling asleep with a crashing headache and the smell of sex in his bed.

He had called David the next morning, and asked him a question instead of saying hello.

_Why is it that I can get angry about being a Jew, being one of 'those people' even in America, and I can stand up in front of a class of children and make them angry too, but if ... if I want -- _

You made being Jewish into a fight, he said. _You always did. It wasn't that way for the rest of us, Toby. Not always._

You got married. You've got kids ... you understand that ... You love someone. And no-one can arrest you for it. There wasn't any fight, when you wanted something. Someone.

You're too attached to running away. To the poetry of being an exile.

Formative experiences, David.

Try staying in one place.

Dying?

The other thing, Toby.

It's too late.

And David had said, _We'll see_.

*

**interlude: in red ink and corrections**

It starts when Toby's fingers curl around Sam's wrist, gently, as though to check his pulse. It is the first cold day -- they both remember that afterwards; more blues outside than gold and brown and shrivelling leaves on the trees and the smell of winter on the air. Sam is sitting at the desk beside the window and the last thing he sees before he looks up into Toby's face is a young girl in a red wool skirt and a scarf, walking fast as people will when they expect rain or cold winds. Her quickened steps, and the swing of the scarf in the air, dissolve against Sam's closed eyes, and Toby's warm hands.

Toby catches her too, this woman in red who walks in a way that reminds him of rivers and sinning, and one cold morning that seemed to last for years. Her reflection walks away in Sam's eyes, getting smaller; disappears. Toby tightens his grip around Sam's wrist and gives up a silent prayer that sounds more like a threat and has the desperate cadences of loss bound up in its phrases. This late in the game G-d has become a friend he hardly sees but they can always pick up where they left off, and Toby isn't scared anymore; no longer afraid of the bargains he can't help but make. _No more payments, friend, and no more threats; you can't have him back._

Toby holds on tight and Sam looks up from the window, still half somewhere else. His face is dazed with light and he has to blink twice before he really focusses, Toby thinks, his pupils wide and bright-black.

"Are you working?" Toby asks him.

"No. Not really."

"Watching?"

"Yeah."

"Come with me."

"Where?"

"Not far. Come on."

Their bedroom is small, east-facing. The light has started to fade from the room now, nestling in corners and Toby silent insistence that the day isn't over yet; that there is still some light to be had. He nudges Sam through the door first, then closes and stands with his back against it his palms flat against the wood and his wrists crossed. He looks at Sam.

"Bed?"

"Yeah."

"Toby."

"Sam?"

"I actually have a deadline I kinda have to -- "

"Not today."

"Toby?"

He doesn't say anything, only stares, only looks. And his eyes drift from hair that has had Sam's fingers in it all morning -- disordering and misshaping so that he finally looks like a cliché of a writer instead of a politician; to the open collar of a casual shirt, light blue flannel with ink smears around the buttons that Sam hasn't noticed yet, and Toby hopes he never will; to the hand curled around Sam's hip, how it looks different now to the paradigm Toby still holds in his head -- that young man who had no marks on him, no scars, no tiny hairs, no raised veins, now has calluses, stains and character. Toby raises his eyes, tries to smile again.

"I ... I wanted you."

When he smiles it isn't any less like a sunrise than it was in 1956, in a lecture theatre where the dust motes flew in the light.

"Yeah, I don't have an answer for that," he says, wryly smiling.

"So come to bed."

"All right."

They lie on the bed, and untie ties and unbutton shirts. They kiss, and Sam remembers something he hasn't thought about in years, even this year, because pilgrimages must look forward and not backwards, even within this peripatetic love story of theirs, and he had forgotten. He lies on the bed with his lover, and forces his fingers to make half-remembered journeys across Toby's mouth. The routes have not changed though the scenery has, a little. Sam's thumb rests in the streak of bright white that has appeared in Toby's beard, just to the right of centre, like a fingerprint, or a thumbprint. Sam covers it, then bends to kiss it; Toby shivers and when he opens his mouth -- to sigh or speak, it isn't clear -- Sam slips his thumb inside and lets the world contract around that one point of warmth and wetness and pressure; Toby's teeth grazing the knuckle and his tongue pressed down and his lips closing around. Sam closes his eyes and strokes and pets, and eases his thumb in and out, in and out.

Toby chuckles, eventually, just a rumble at the back of his throat but it startles Sam out of his dreaming and when he opens his eyes, as they both do, Toby sees a flush rising in Sam's skin, rosying his cheeks and the length of his neck. He slips a hand down across the front of Sam's jeans and finds a corresponding rising, and smiles. His fingers fiddle with belt and fly buttons, then pulls aside underwear. Then Toby presses his own fingers into Sam's flesh as hard and insistent as Sam had his; pulling at hair gently, then not; running his knuckles over the little set of moles just beside Sam's left hipbone that look like a half-finished constellation; easing his whole hand inside that warm place and holding Sam's cock in his hand, then feeling it harden further against his palm and his wrist with his fingers stroking Sam's small and velvet-smooth balls. His thighs open wide when Toby lies between them and kisses around those tender places, and rubs his cheek against Sam's erection, knowing the coarseness of his beard will only exacerbate Sam's arousal, grinning and keeping Sam's legs pinned down to the bed. Sam writhes and begs; Toby listens, unmoved, but for the heaviness in his own cock. Sam comes in a long burst with his dick deep in Toby's mouth, calling out his name, fingers twisted in the sheets --

_toby god toby please_ please _god toby fuck toby toby toby_

\-- Toby swallows, as much as he can, and rubs his chin, cheeks, fingers over Sam's cock and the wet places across his thighs. Kisses them, then Sam's belly, then his chest, sucks at both nipples, then the sweat-covered place at the base of his throat. He kisses Sam's mouth smiling, almost laughing.

"What is _wrong_ with you?" Sam asks, laughing himself, with his hands playing in the curls covering the back of Toby's neck, stroking, shifting his body around the weight of his lover's, thighs still parted, now around Toby's hips.

"You have an objection?"

"No, I wouldn't say that."

"What _would_ you say, Mister Seaborn?"

"I'd say ... _thank you_, sir. And I'll write the Dean of the College a nice letter in the morning."

Toby laughs; a sudden flash of teeth and wet mouth quickly buried against Sam's neck. Then he raises his head and Sam stares at a face now tender and uncomfortable, blushing with embarrassment instead of desire; and he knows what it was in Toby's mind to say for a moment, that they don't say now because it means the same as 'goodbye' and always has. Sam kisses him and opens his own thighs wider, tips his hips up to Toby's and lets his head fall back in the pillows as Toby starts to thrust against his belly and loins, rubbing against the place where the map folds and secrets start, holding himself up on his hands and braced arms, becoming huge and dark over Sam's body. He comes in spurts that fall across Sam's ribcage and the high flat part of his stomach. Sam holds him, tightly, with his arms folded around Toby's shoulders. He wants to whisper those words which were _goodbye_, but he doesn't, only kisses Toby's cheek and sleeps, curled close around him. Just a night like any other, just a small coming-together. Sam sleeps, and his dreams are sweet.

*

**i. small things still matter a great deal**

He met Mary in, of all places, a library.

When he first moved back to California, after graduate school ended for real and his father called the tiny New England boarding house where he was staying as the last days of the Butler summer semester bled out into the river to ask if he was done with finding himself and perhaps ready to come home and work in the firm, if he was ready to be a man now, the only thing Sam wanted were books.

He brought two suitcases back on the plane; one so heavy that it strained the muscles in his arm so they ached for a week, and one that seemed to be full of nothing at all. One of clothes, and one of books. Mostly Poli. Sci. texts, the odd refugee from the English department's reading lists, the books he covered in plain brown paper in that boarding house so that his father wouldn't see the titles, his diary -- all four volumes by then, all covered in ink blots and the hot little memories that crowd around him when he thinks about them, and the characters inside. Waiting in the airport lounge for him, smoking a thin cigar whose smoke curled up past the lopsided brim of his Panama hat, Sam's father took the lighter suitcase instead of saying hello and walked out to the car with Sam's sense of incipient misery flowing in his wake.

It's not that his father didn't read books: he had a study whose walls seemed to be made of them, but they were all law texts; constitutional, torts, property, land, commercial. Sam thinks of the darkness in that room, how it gathers around the wing-back chair that is turned away from the door, around the great oak desk, and around the bookshelves. But, even in that study, there was a small pile of less proper reading matter: crime novels, because Norman Seaborn liked a mystery, as well as a good strong male lead. Chandler, Hammett and Cain; nothing British, even Conan Doyle, and nothing he could accuse of literature. Sam, who had stolen away with all of the books on that pile as a small boy and built his own, rather larger collection in a corner of his own room, thought it was possible that his father wouldn't know what literature was, even if Sam gave him a ten part lecture series on the subject with object lessons from _The Big Sleep_. When he was a little boy, it used to make him cry, break his stupid kid-heart when he would try to talk to his father about a book he was reading and his dad would turn his back, and not say anything, and wait for him to grow out of that small infatuation, and the next one, and the one after. Sam thought that his father would be able to wait them all out, until one day he would turn round and clap Sam on the back and say: you made it kid, you're a man now.

Sam watched his father's back disappear into the Californian heat haze that morning, and could feel it all starting again. The final phase: manhood within his grasp. He wondered, for a tiny moment that twists out of his head like a leaf in the breeze, what his father would make of Toby's kind of manhood: the spirit of America; struggle and pilgrimage, and quiet words. He did not come to any conclusions.

So in the first few weeks, sleeping again in his old bed which seems so impossibly small for his weight and dreams, what Sam wants most is a book to disappear into. And the place that he goes to find one is a branch of Orange County Public Library, at Laguna Beach.

It's a little out of his way, to say the least. But he doesn't drive. He wants to walk, get sweaty and tired and empty. He's hoping that the sunny miles will clear his head; in the end he just feels a little dizzy as he walks into the branch with his driver's ID in his hand and goes to the front desk, and sees her -- a girl in a blue jumper.

He isn't sure, afterwards, if it is sunstroke, or temporary madness, or anger that has been boiling up for better than two years now. And it takes more than one meeting, one set of clumsy smiles exchanged, one brush of their hands together, one stumble over giving his name to her and one attempt to listen carefully when she gives hers in return. It takes a couple of dates that don't go very well, and a few that go better. It takes long conversations about literature and politics in the back of Sam's car which they have instead of making love. It helps that Sam can tell his father doesn't really like her, even though the knowledge keeps him awake some nights. It takes years, breaking, and putting back together, a friendship that contorts itself, unasked. But eventually he asks her: will you marry me? And she says yes.

The firm is running well, and Sam even has time to write, secretly. Mary knows; she buys in the notebooks and the new pens, hides the stolen legal pads from Sam's father. He loves her for that, even in the middle of this mapped-out life.

But one day he brings home a book, bound in blue with silver lettering, and he reads it in the kitchen, alone, like a secret.

*

**ii. how dark his eyes, how red his mouth, and sharp his shoulders**

"I think I have a new ... thing."

"A _thing_."

"A new idea."

Toby smiles, and Sam finds that similes are bursting in his head as he watches: _like a match being struck; like a thunderclap; like a sunrise at the end of an all-nighter, just as you are falling asleep_. Sam smiles back at him.

"That's ... good?"

Sam nods. "It's good."

And it is.

They are not all about Toby, these stories, the tumbling of words one after another that fall from his pen unasked for, but a lot of them are, that first year. Most of them don't make it out of the notebooks. He writes them over a few nights, not needing to think much or go back over story or language, hardly any polish, but when he comes back to them after a week, or two, he doesn't think they are good enough -- not much more than love songs in prose: how he seems beautiful to Sam when he is sleeping; how when they fuck Sam feels like an inverse of himself, the angry, desperate boy he tries not to recognise, that nothing matters but being pressed against his body and that if he squeezes his eyes shut hard enough it can stay that way; that he has dreams, sometimes, about other ways this might have happened, well or badly or only different, and wakes up feeling almost drunk or high, on possibilities.

Eventually real stories coalesce, but he is still there, at the centre; the string-puller. Sam calls this book by that name in his head and scribbles it in pencil on the inside cover of the notebook that contains his notes.

The stories they tell about each other are the ones they don't share. He doesn't mention it to Toby, and Toby doesn't ask.

It takes a little while, and in the end takes much longer than Sam ever thought. But when Sam gives his speech at the Pulitzer dinner, he addresses it to the dark-eyed man with the impassive face who doesn't say anything except a low _well done_ into his ear as Sam gets back to his seat, and tips him a wink out of sight.

That night when they fuck Sam feels the world explode and stay expanded, spread over the ceiling like a star map. He grins, then laughs like an idiot. Toby says something sarcastic. Sam kisses him to shut him up. Before he falls asleep Toby whispers _I'm so proud of you_ into the dark. Sam curls his hands around these words, then throws them up against the ceiling, where they sparkle in the night.

*

**iii. like a foreign country**

They go to the movies. There is a small, slightly flea-bitten but all the same pleasantly atmospheric independent movie house in Soho, and Toby doesn't say that is where they are going only walks them up and across, half the length of Broadway. Sam grins when he stops in front of the theater, and nods his head towards the door.

"Here."

"Here?"

"Here."

"Okay, you know that I'm not -- "

Toby smirks. "I won't ask you to do anything ... inappropriate."

Sam smiles. "Okay."

But the movie is _Sunday Bloody Sunday_, and between the British accents and the hard grey kisses, Sam leans his head down on Toby's shoulder and sighs up into the air. They are in the back row, and it is easy enough for Toby's slip one arm around Sam's neck and allow, as Sam's head gets pushed nearer to Toby's body, a kiss to be pressed against Sam's hairline. Sam moves his hand to Toby's thigh, strokes the back of it there until his legs part a little. Toby says Sam's name, softly, like a warning, but Sam doesn't move his hand until Toby moves it for him, picking it up and laying it on the seat arm. He shushes Sam's protest then drops not his head but his own hand, into Sam's lap.

"You sure?"

"Yeah."

"We'll get you cleaned up afterward."

Sam smiles, with his head leaning back on the seat. "Yeah."

His hand is warm, firm, running ponderously up and down Sam's erection. Sam has his orgasm with his face pressed into Toby's shoulder; Toby leaves another kiss in his hair.

They go to Central Park. It does not snow and they stand on the bridge before the lake watching the water and the odd, bobbing fragments of ice run with the current. Sam stands close to Toby, close enough to feel the warmth radiating from his body, but straight-backed, _masculine_. Between the growing dusk and the dark colours of both their overcoats, no one can see that Sam's arm is linked through Toby's, pulled as close as he can to the other body there on the bridge.

Toby smirks to himself at the hotdog stands at Coney Island and Sam sees his smile twist down into his coat and remembers being curled inside his arms, in a creaking bed, in a cold room. Toby hands him a hotdog for his left hand and a stick covered in cotton candy for his right and says, "Don't eat it all at once," with his index finger wagging in Sam's face. And Sam laughs hard enough that the little kid waiting in line for the next batch of candy stares up at him, with an expression that lets him know he sounded crazy-stupid just then, maybe like this kid's big sister does when she's hot for some stupid boy. Sam tries desperately to make his face straight and turns away into the wind, facing out towards the Atlantic, his face close to completely numb with the rain; but it doesn't work. He laughs, stupidly and crazily, with Toby's hand curled around his shoulder, squeezing tight.

They walk across the Brooklyn Bridge while the rain turns to sleet, and then to snow. Behind a huge strut of the bridge, freezing metal pressed against the back of his neck, he kisses Toby Ziegler and feels the world dim out of focus as Toby's lips touch his -- bleeding into the grey January sky the red of Toby's scarf and the blues and whites of the high-rise buildings growing up behind Toby's shoulders -- until he closes his eyes, and sees more colour behind them. His fingers catch in Toby's hair, stroke round the curve of his ear. Toby blows on Sam's lips, from half an inch away a little spread of warmth. Then he smiles, with his eyes rather than his mouth. Sam puts his hands around Toby's neck, rests his forearms on Toby's shoulders.

"Toby?"

"Mmm?" Toby says, muffled, with his face pressed against Sam's neck.

"You know this could probably get us arrested, right?"

"Only if we do it in the city," he murmurs.

"But on a major landmark, this is okay?"

"I'm sure I read a city ordinance once."

"A circular from the Dean?"

Toby's laugh vibrates against Sam's neck. "Yeah."

"Of course."

"I think you credit the Dean of Sarah -- " he stops to press an open-mouthed kiss against Sam's mouth which spreads across Sam's cheek and jaw, becomes a sharp nibble on Sam's ear, " -- Lawrence ... with a little too much say in the business of the city, Mister Seaborn."

"You think ... if we were on a boat, perhaps?"

"Perhaps."

"I mean, what's the jurisdiction on -- "

"Sam."

"I'm talking too much?"

"A little."

"I should shut up and let you ... do whatever it is you want to do. Here in the middle of the Bridge."

"Perhaps."

"Well, I'm not taking my pants off."

Toby laughs, loud enough -- probably -- for anyone passing them in a car with a wound-down window, if there could be such a thing in New York in January in the sleet, to hear the rumble, even though it is mostly directed into Sam's overcoat. He runs his fingers over Sam's mouth, and later he will tell Sam that his lips looked like an illustration of the expression 'bee-stung' -- swollen with blood, and full, and like they were when Sam was nineteen and Toby first kissed them red. He pinches Sam's bottom lip between his finger and thumb, then rubs the pad of his thumb there, as if to smooth out a wrinkle he has made in a shirt or a pair of pants. His eyes still say nothing, even to Sam, but they are warm.

He steps back, turns on his heel and looks out over the river. Then he turns back again, and holds out his hand. Sam takes it.

"I thought I would take you somewhere."

"Where?"

"You'll see."

"Toby ... "

"You'll see, Sam."

*

**iv. liberals or fags or fairies or perverts or homos**

'Somewhere' turns out to be the Carlyle hotel. Toby gives his name to the clerk behind the desk looking down his nose and with that blank expression on his face that begs the other guy to make something of it, this funny-sounding name with the Jewish vowels. The clerk skims the page and looks pretty shocked to actually find the reservation; Toby bounces a little on his heels. He counts out money on the counter, then he smiles. He signs his name, then throws Sam the keys.

"Do you have any bags, sir?" the clerk asks, rather less subserviently than Sam expects he would have if it had been Sam himself asking.

"No," Toby says, still smiling his simmering smile, "No bags."

"Enjoy your stay at the Carlyle, sir," the clerk shoots off, his eyes half-narrowed.

Toby turns back towards the desk, but he doesn't really meet the clerk's eyes. "Yes. We will."

In the elevator, with the back of the porter turned to them Sam slaps his hand against Toby's chest, and hisses under his breath: "What the hell are you ... You -- _we_ can't afford ... We don't even have any bags, Toby!"

Toby chuckles, looks down at his shoes. "We won't need them," he says, extra quietly.

"Toby!"

"Don't worry about the money. I have tenure _and_ royalties." He turns to Sam, frowns for a second, "And actually, you do as well, so ... "

Sam laughs, then passes his hand over his mouth. He saw the shoulder of the elevator operator twitch. He says, "I'll get the drinks, then, shall I?"

"The room service," Toby says, eyes twinkling. "Yes."

The elevator rises to an unbelievably high floor and when it finally stops, Toby holds out a hand, gesturing that Sam should go first; it's a proper date now, Sam thinks, and grins down at his shoes. Sam turns back to watch Toby, coat billowing as he follows Sam's footsteps down the corridor, and thinks he sees something like a real smile on the face of the elevator porter. He doesn't know what the smile signifies -- amusement, maybe, at two queers playing at love in the open air, or an adult version of the expression on the little kid's face at Coney Island: man, what d'you think you _look_ like right now? But Sam prefers to think that the porter recognised something worth seeing: a freedom exercised, a love expressed, a common humanity acknowledged. He doesn't say anything to Toby, because he knows it's the kind of thought Toby would, outwardly at least, mock him for even allowing room in his head, but he's glad he saw the smile even so.

Toby opens the door of the room, throws it wide of his body and lets Sam go through first. It is huge, and all decked out in what looks -- to Sam's dazzled eyes and in the high January sun glancing off the snow -- like gold. A wide window with heavy curtains in yellow and red is filling most of the wall opposite the door and through it is the perfect New York cityscape; landmarks covered with the snowfall, rising out of it, like standing stones. In front of the window, an ornate desk with a vase of fresh flowers on it that Toby walks over to and begins to fiddle with, plucking at petals, then catching his thumb in one of the thorns. He hisses a curse under his breath, then puts his thumb in his mouth, still watching Sam. Sam just carries on staring at the room. The bed is the last thing, of course: wide, white, pristine, dominating the room completely even against the neighbours looking in through the window -- the Chrysler and the Life Insurance Building, the shadow of the river -- it almost seems to glow in the light. They could lose each other in there, Sam thinks, search all night for the other one's body under the sheets.

"God, Toby."

"You like it?"

"It's ... it's gotta have been really expensive."

"I can't do nice things for you? You always have to worry about the price of everything?" He takes off his coat, then his scarf and walks back over towards Sam to drop them in the chair by the door. He kisses Sam's cheek. "Tenure," he whispers, as he moves away.

"But -- "

"Sam."

"Sorry."

"Do you _like_ it, Mister Seaborn?"

Sam looks up, lets a smile curl on his lips. "Yes, sir."

Toby stands in front of the window again, and Sam notices that the square of his shoulder is just obscuring the outline of the Chrysler building. Toby reaches up for his tie, begins to pull it apart gently, and very slowly, staring into Sam's eyes. He says, "So you'll put out then?"

Sam laughs, properly now. "Don't I always?"

Toby tilts his head, frowns as if he's thinking over a complicated crossword clue; Sam grins. "Actually, yes."

Sam walks over to him, absently wondering whether he ought to take his shoes off out of respect for the carpets as he does so. He thinks, while he's still walking, that he'll take hold of Toby's hands or kiss him maybe, but when he's an inch away from Toby's face and everything there is dark and inscrutable, Sam finds he can only run his fingers down the centre of Toby's shirt, following the line of buttons, fiddling, nervous.

"Better than the Bridge?" Toby asks, in his softest voice.

"Yeah."

"Better than the apartment?"

"Yes."

"Better than my old bed? At Butler."

Sam looks up, half-startled, but half full of memories he hadn't forgotten as much as buried -- a bath growing cold and a bed that squeaked and wasn't big enough for two men, that he used to worry would buckle under their weight in the night. "Much better."

"I just wanted ... I wanted to take you somewhere nice."

"Somewhere _nice_. Your vocabulary's declining."

"You're putting me off my game. Standing there."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be."

"What are we doing, Toby?"

"Taking a trip."

"Play-acting," Sam says.

"Maybe."

"Proving something ... proving it to me?"

"No."

"Toby?"

"Maybe, a little."

"You don't need to do that."

"Maybe I'm doing it for me," he says, with a tender little smile that shatters like a dropped glass after a second on his face.

"Toby?"

"I hated it too ... being _different_. Running away from ... that. All the time."

"Toby."

"But _this_ is what it is now -- you and I. A nice hotel. A walk on the beach. Peace that ... " He stops as his voice catches in his throat, as it quivers slightly over his vowels. He swallows, then looks back up into Sam's face with a small, embarrassed smile on his face, and continues, "Peace that I didn't think I'd ever have."

"And cotton candy," Sam says, smiling, a little sadly.

"Yeah."

"It's enough," Sam says. "Isn't it?"

"Yeah," Toby says.

Later, in that huge bed, in Toby's arms, watching the snow falling outside, the detritus of the room service lying on the table beside the bed, the warm spreading contentment of the well-fucked filling up his belly along with the food, Sam thinks he really is happy; that he finally understands what that means, how it rests like a weight in his chest, something heavy, the way gold is heavy. It melts inside him, warming his sight, making him aware of every twitch of Toby's body, every sigh; letting him rest in the certainty that they are sighs of a corresponding contentment, which they will learn to shape and twist and pull around themselves for however long is left.

*

**epilogue: clear and huge against the sky**

All the kids from the College turn out for it, and there is something beautiful about them all, standing there in black jackets and white shirts, the girls with red lipstick, the boys with red eyes; something that means that Sam doesn't cry. It takes this green lawn full of children crying for his dead lover for Sam to really feel like a man; that he should do something to comfort them, say some words, say a prayer. He doesn't know any of the prayers Toby would have accepted. So, he figures, maybe he'll just open his mouth, and see what happens.

"Maybe some of you, maybe most of you, know a few things about Toby Ziegler.

"I'm guessing a lot of you knew him as a teacher, as a great educator, as a man greatly intolerant of a misplaced comma or a misapplied rule of grammar, as the guy whose grade you were maybe most frightened, and most excited, to get back on your papers. As someone you could ask the big question; the one that had kept you up all that night, tossing and turning, not sure whether you were on to something amazing or something amazingly stupid. As someone it paid to have an argument with, because you always seemed to understand your own position that little bit clearer afterward.

"And maybe even more of you knew his books, his poetry. That he was one of America's most gifted writers and one of her most beautiful poets. That when your English professor told you that you should read _Every Waking Morning_ before you die, he or she really wasn't kidding, and once you had read it you went around telling everyone else you knew that they should do the same.

"Maybe some of you knew him as a friend. Maybe some of you told him your problems, and if you did, well, then you have my admiration -- he wasn't the easiest guy to give a confidence to. Trust me, I should know."

They laugh, not dutifully. And Sam gets a little strength going then, just a little steam.

"So maybe some of you knew that I loved him, that we lived in the same apartment in Brooklyn for almost twenty years, that my sunlight broke on him every morning, that he made terrible pancakes and amazing roast chicken, that I'd write his name in the sky if I could, clear and huge and true.

"I guess maybe a lot of you knew that. I guess going to Sarah Lawrence clues you up on more than a few things. I guess great literature probably does too. I guess a lot of you standing here today understand what I'm trying to say because you've been there yourselves, or you have friends who have. I guess you think I'm going to use the word 'hero' now. But I'm not.

"I think if you knew anything about Toby, you'd know why that is, and whatever we think of him and however we've loved him, he wouldn't want a title like that. He would say it was up to history, and shrug, and take a slug of Jack Daniel's, and get another few sentences down before he went to bed.

"So I guess what I'm trying to say is: remember the man you loved, and not a legend. Legends are great, and we need them, but a simple, genuine love is more powerful than anything, and is its own memorial. He'd have understood that.

"Thanks for coming by."

As they file away from the grave, some of them try to say reassuring things to Sam, or just some words that might make a difference. But he doesn't hold it against them; he'd have tried to do the same thing, in their place. A couple of the boys press his hand, a couple of the girls kiss his cheek. One of them hands him a folded piece of paper -- a letter, Sam thinks -- and says that he thinks the Professor might have liked it, and maybe Sam will too. That kid is a slight boy of maybe twenty years, wearing a green leather jacket over a black shirt and pants. His hair, too, is black, and it falls over his collar, and against the green jacket the black has hints of a ravenish blue. Sam thinks, almost unconsciously, that the boy is beautiful. And when he gets back to the apartment that night, Sam finds out that his writing is beautiful too -- a letter that might as well have been a poem, not blank verse but something inherently rhythmical, settling in Sam's mind like a refrain from some piano piece he really ought to know the name of. Sam examines the paper carefully twice, but there is no phone number anywhere on it.

*

When he writes it all out afterwards, it sounds more like a poem or a song. Twenty more years have passed but Sam still feels as though he could walk backwards into the memory of that kiss by the window, and maybe that's what makes it what it is: part elegy, part sonnet, a manuscript with so many fingerprints on it Sam can hardly see the text anymore, and he just writes, for his life, as fast as he can get the sentences down.

His agent is wary, even when Sam says words like 'slipstream' and 'magic realism' into the phone and promises, trying to make a joke, something that will make the Pulitzer guys sorry they gave him the award so soon.

It is only a more honest, a more complete, version of the books they have both written before: a palimpsest of a story, a hundred-thousand threads all drawn together; a million universes where this battle was fought; versions of themselves existing in histories both real and faked, and futures Sam thinks both plausible and wildly fantastical; just a different way to say that love is love wherever it falls. The critics, who are required to notice it because it has the name _Sam Seaborn_ following the words _Pulitzer Prize-winning author_ on the cover and not brush it under the so-called pulp fiction rug, call it -- stupidly and ignorantly in Sam's humble opinion -- the first true sci-fi epic, and praise his ability to draw out his alternate histories and the veracity of his love story. They make less fuss than Sam had expected over the fact that both the lead and the love interest are male.

The bit of the book he gets asked to read most often is the parting of the lovers; the centre-piece. After a while he doesn't even need the book to read from. It is more like he is describing a picture he can see in front of him.

The book sells, magnificently. Young and fashionable gay men suddenly want to read science-fiction, and Sam has to go on the radio and the television, and finds that he is much better at talking himself up than he expected. But when they ask about Toby, he always moves the conversation aside, like a parent lifting a sleeping child up off their lap.

At night, or late in the evening, alone in the apartment, Sam talks to him. After so long, after thirty-five years, Sam doesn't really need answers to the questions he asks and if that makes him nuts he doesn't care much. There are ghosts in the walls of this place, and Sam likes their company and the journeys they make with him; where there aren't any maps or roads or rivers, or any way of getting lost.

He turns out all the lights and gets into the bed, curling into the hollows that weren't made by his own body, and closes his eyes, and whispers, _Toby_.

The kid -- the one from the funeral -- comes by one day, perhaps six months after. His only explanation for turning up at Sam's door with a couple of books and a legal pad under his arm is, "You were ... both ... in the phone book," and Sam, who still goes whole days with the rhythms of that single not-poem locked in his head, lets him in. They sit for a little while, and they talk -- about books and poetry, about Toby, and the kid only nods when Sam suggests, gently, that maybe he should be getting back to his dorm or his apartment or wherever it is he belongs. But he comes back the next week, and the week after that, and Sam continues to let him in. The boy carries echoes around him -- the colour of his hair; the movements, like leaves on the wind, of his hands; the lilt of his vowels; the curves and arcs of his handwriting. Some of the echoes are ones that Sam doesn't hear, but others are unmissable even from inside the rust-red whirlwind of grief Sam is standing inside.

He finds, after a while, that his dreams become confused: signals scrambled and streets he once knew well leading only to dead ends at the wrong side of town. The thing that helps, the thing that turns the pain bright and white and almost glorious, is writing -- new words. Sam gives them to the kid to read, and the boy returns the favour. They begin something, with tiny steps.

One night the kid stays over, sleeping on the couch, and in the morning Sam stands in front of him for a while, watching, gazing at his smooth, pale cheek. There are maps there, and perhaps one day Sam will care to read them. In the meantime the kid sleeps, and Sam makes a pot of coffee, sits at the table by the window, and writes down some new words.


End file.
